Why Oil Slick is More than a Trend
The Background
Image from Instagram @auracolorist
If you spend any time at all browsing instagram you've seen more than your fair share of vivid rainbow hair styles. A lot of stylists like bescene and hairgod zito do some incredible work with this kind of style, and a lot of others do some not so incredible work. But the point is, a lot of stylists are doing it, and there's some danger of it getting old. Fortunately we can always count on artists to play with styles and give us a fresh take. Enter Aura Friedman and the oil slick hair style.
Image from Instagram @auracolorist
Also referred to as “Duck Feather,” it started out as a way to give brunettes the rainbow color without a full, hair-ripping battery of bleach, but what ultimately came out was a new way of looking at rainbows. Friedman told Popsugar that she was inspired by the rainbows that form in oil puddles after it rains. She stacks purples on top of greens to create an “iridescent feel.” It doesn't pop like your typical pastel rainbow; it shimmers and glows.
Friedman is an Israel born, U.S. raised colorist with twenty years of experimentation under her belt. For many of those years she's been setting trends in New York on runways and with various designers like Peter Som. You've seen her work on the likes of M.I.A. and Lady Gaga, so it's no surprise to find her bringing something so provoking and a little outlandish like Oil Slick.
The Art of Oil Slick
Image from Instagram @seangodard
Most of this you've probably read before. Oil Slick has been going around the fashion magazines for about a month now. But these magazines keep using two words that create misconceptions about the hair style. One is “healthy.” This is technically true because the technique uses far less bleach to dye dark hair than normal. But it's not free of bleach. You still use some to lighten strands just a little for lighter colors like blue and teal.
Second and more important, they call it a “trend.” That's fine if you're an angsty teenager looking for a way to stand out at prom, but Aura is a hair artist of twenty years. She told Popsugar this was an effect she had been trying to get in hair for years. She found something beautiful in a puddle of car fluid that most people disregard as a dirty byproduct of modern civilization, then used her craft to show us that beauty. That's not a trend, that's pure art.
Image from Instagram @carlycutsmyhair
That doesn't mean the Duck Feather will last forever, get hauled up onto the walls of the Louvre to collect dust and camera flashes. The Oil Slick will pass with time just like the mullet and the mohawk. But to call it a “trend” devalues it, and demands less thought than it deserves. There's always something to be gained from looking at a good hairstyle, especially coming from someone as experienced as Aura Friedman. Whether it's meant to make a statement or just bring some deeper understanding of beauty, hair art is about more than looking good, and our language should reflect that.